WND EXCLUSIVE

7 dead newborns 'no ordinary crime'

Prosecution swamping court with evidence in Gosnell murder trial

Michael Carl is a veteran journalist who served overseas in the U.S. Army. He has operated his own political consulting firm and worked as a press secretary for a vice presidential candidate. He also has two master's degrees, is a bi-vocational priest and lives with his family in the Northeast United States.

(Warning: This article contains graphic details concerning abortions and may disturb some readers.)

PHILADELPHIA – This is not some late night horror show in which blood gushes in every scene, severed body parts appear randomly and death eventually overtakes almost everyone.

This has blood gushing, severed body parts and an abundance of death, but it is real.

It’s the ongoing murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, whose “House of Horrors” has pulled back a curtain to reveal secrets about the abortion industry that everyone involved, from the grand jury on, probably wishes could be turned off.

Gosnell has been charged with murdering a woman who was getting an abortion as well as seven newborn babies who, against odds, survived the abortion procedure and were breathing and crying in his office, as the pro-life group Operation Rescue has documented.

The discoveries include:

Rusty and filthy abortion equipment has been brought into the courtroom to document unsanitary conditions.

Medical records appear to have blood and other stains on them.

Gosnell’s staff acted as though they were doctors, even though some had little or no medical training.

Medications, including anesthetics, found in the office had expired years earlier.

A defense attorney blamed the woman, Bhutan immigrant Karnamaya Mongar, for her own death, since she left several blanks on her medical form. Prosecutors said she spoke little English and likely was unaware she needed to provide information.

Patients appeared to repeatedly get overdoses of drugs for their abortion procedures, including Mongar.

Photographs of the bodies of babies, revealed gaping wounds in the back of their necks. According to testimony, Gosnell or staff members routinely snipped their spinal cords to make sure they were dead. Operation Rescue said: “The babies were all intact and had the appearance of being partially mummified or dried. The brownish-black skin had shrunk as it dried, revealing the upper spinal column that authorities say was pierced with scissors in order to snip the spinal cords of newborn babies born alive during abortions by Gosnell.”

Photographs were introduced of babies’ feet, or even whole legs, Gosnell had preserved in jars.

Testimony revealed Gosnell was reusing plastic tubes for abortions.

Crime scene investigator John Taggart testified about retrieving a large garbage disposal that was under the sink in the wash room. Operation Rescue president Troy Newman explained the significance: “I had seen it before in the abortion clinic in Wichita, Kan., that Operation Rescue bought and closed, then renovated into a usable pro-life office. Aborted baby remains were likely ground up in the disposal then flushed down the sink.”

A former Gosnell employee, Steven Massof, testified the abortion business was chaotic and that he saw more than 100 babies born alive who had their necks snipped in what he described as “a beheading.”

He also testified at times “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.”

The latest testimony, Wednesday, reported by Operation Rescue staff member Cheryl Sullenger, included a “medical assistant,” Latosha Lewis, 31, who worked for Gosnell for almost a decade.

She’s pleaded guilty to drug charges stemming from her work and faces up to 80 years in prison. She, like most of the other former employees, is testifying to receive leniency in her own sentencing.

The trial is approaching its sixth week of evidence from prosecutors, who are expected to wind down their work soon and turn the jury over to defense lawyers. The defense argues the babies were not murdered, because chemicals were used to kill them before they were removed from their mothers.

The grisly testimony also has broken through into the establishment media, which almost uniformly had ignored the trial.

When testimony surfaced, such as that from clinic worker James Johnson, who said he threatened to quit his maintenance job at the clinic because of aborted babies’ body parts frequently clogging the building’s plumbing, headlines started appearing.

The outrage began when the grand jury looked into Gosnell’s operations and activities.

When the FBI raided the location, the grand jury report stated, “There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs.”

The grand jury asked: “How did this go on so long? Pennsylvania’s Department of Health has deliberately chosen not to enforce laws that should afford patients at abortion clinics the same safeguards and assurances of quality health care as patients of other medical service providers.”

“The callous killing of babies outside the womb, the routinely performed third trimester abortions, the deaths of at least two patients, and the grievous health risks inflicted on countless other women by Gosnell and his unlicensed staff are not the only shocking things that this grand jury investigation uncovered. What surprised the jurors even more is the official neglect that allowed these crimes and conditions to persist for years in a Philadelphia medical facility,” Andursko wrote.

President Obama has been silent on the issues raised in the Gosnell trial, even though the death toll was nearly three times the number of lives lost in the Boston Marathon terror attack.

Matt Vespa, writing for NewsBusters, said a motive for Schwartz’s silence may be her partnership in an abortion clinic.

Vespa said reporter J.D. Mullane of the Bucks County Courier News “has some great, incisive questions for Schwartz connected to the Gosnell matter, particularly whether Schwartz ever referred any patients to Gosnell.”

“Her clinic stopped performing abortions in 1984, but continued with issuing referrals to other clinics. Schwartz has been curiously silent on the issue, and larger media outlets seem to be silent as well, failing to ask her if she ever referred women to Gosnell, for example,” Vespa wrote.

But the case has been drawing more and more attention to the gruesome procedures common in abortion businesses.

“The behavior of news organizations often owes more to chaos theory than conspiracy theory. I don’t think that editors and reporters got together and decided not to give the Gosnell trial a lot of attention because it would highlight the evils of abortion,” she said.

“I do think that it wasn’t on their radar screen – and that it should have been. The murders of seven newborn babies, done so horrifically, would be no ordinary crime. Any suggestion, including mine on Friday, that this is just another murder trial is a miscalculation,” she continued.

“Judged on news value alone, the Gosnell trial deserves more coverage than it’s had, in The Times and elsewhere.”

The Washington Post’s Melinda Henneberger said partisanship has played a major role in the lack of coverage.

“The ultimate non-partisan body – a criminal grand jury – has supplied us with the graphic, 261-page horror story of Kermit Gosnell, M.D., who stands accused of butchering seven babies – yes, after they were born alive – and fatally doping a refugee from Nepal with Demerol in a clinic that smelled of cat urine, where the furniture was stained with blood and the doctor kept a collection of severed baby feet. As often as possible, the report says, Gosnell induced labor for women so pregnant that, as he joked on one occasion, the baby was so big he could ‘walk me to the bus stop.’ Then, hundreds of times over the years, he slit their little necks, according to the grand jury report,” Henneberger wrote.

Illustrative was the handling of the case by the Associated Press. When a former worker at Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society Clinic testified he saw 100 babies born who had their necks snipped, AP headlined the story “Staffer describes chaos at PA abortion clinic.”

“‘Chaos’ isn’t really the story here,” Fox News commentator Kristin Powers observed in a commentary. “Butchering babies that were already born and were older than the state’s 24-week limit for abortions is the story. There is a reason the late Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called this procedure infanticide.”

WND coverage of the Gosnell case dates back to early 2011, when photos of the atrocities were published.